She smiled with her eyes still shut. “The boys just rode,” she said again, soft, like she was putting it away somewhere to keep.
A week later Troy called me on the telephone, which he almost never does.
He hemmed around about the weather and the basis at the elevator. Then he got quiet. Then he said it.
“Ava hasn’t stopped talking about that monitor,” he said. “Kim says it’s all she talks about.”
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“She’s good at it,” I said. “She’s better than good.”
There was a long pause on the line. It was the kind of pause where a man is working something loose that has been stuck in him a long time, maybe since he was a boy on his own daddy’s farm.
“My dad never,” Troy started, and then he stopped. “He had a way about who did what. I guess I never thought about it. I just did it the way it got did.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not mad at you, Troy.”
“Would you,” he said, and I heard him swallow. “Next fall. Would you let me put her in the buddy seat of the home machine some, too?”
“If you’re teaching her to drive, she ought to learn the big one. I could, I’d want to be the one to.” He stopped again. “If that’s all right.”
I stood in my kitchen holding the phone. I looked out the window at the empty north eighty lying open and done under the November gray.
My father’s ground. Dale’s green machine parked at the end of the lane. I thought about my mother eating her dinner standing up.
“That’s all right, Troy,” I said. “That’s better than all right. You teach her the big one. I’ll teach her mine.”
So that is how it is going to be, come next October. A ten year old girl, who will be eleven by then, is going to run two combines in this family, her grandma’s and her father’s.
She is going to know the monitor and the header and the whole business before she is out of grade school.
And somewhere a notion that lived a hundred years in the men of two farms, that rode down from Troy’s daddy and would have ridden right on down into Ava if nobody had gotten up out of a chair, that notion is going to die quiet in a buddy seat.
It will die with a little girl calling out yield numbers at the top of her lungs.
I did not yell it down. I did not argue it down.
I just climbed down out of my own machine, and I walked across the yard, and I buckled her in beside me.
That is all it took. That is all it ever takes. Somebody who gets to say, saying it.